I thought it could be a hardware problem, though. But it was much worse some time ago, before I ~x86 alsa-headers. At that time, I was dual booting with XP (I then switched to Gentoo/Puppy <- for when I break sth important) and the sound was also randomly working.

Hardware?

(Acer laptop I had to send back already for a dead motherboard after a few month of very normal usage)